Mobile apps for consumers have proliferated over the past several years, becoming somewhat of an ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. We think nothing of checking weather updates, movie schedules, and bank balances while we’re on the move, so why has it taken so long for mobile apps to hit big when it comes to engineering and manufacturing?
Certainly there’s an opportunity for vendors to offer apps for engineers that improve their mobility and offer access to at... Read More

Factories today hardly resemble the factories of yesteryear. Today’s factories are full of high-tech digital machinery and robotics that are highly automated. To make today’s digital factories run more efficiency, manufacturing software also needs to advanced.
Siemens this week released the newest version of Tecnomatix software for digital manufacturing, which the company says will help companies in a wide range of industries innovate better and at less risk.
Let’s... Read More

Manufacturers are under the gun increasingly today to develop more customized products for customers. Also referred to as “mass customization,” creating products with specific functionality for special niches of customers is at odds with traditional mass production methods that have been in place for years. In order to respond, companies must adapt and change both their internal design processes as well as the way in which they manufacture products.
Siemens and Tata... Read More

Innovation is today’s CAD products is somewhat expected by users who constantly demand the next level of functionality. After all, designers and engineers are using modern CAD tools to design the next great product, or at least the next great version of a product. The same cannot necessarily be said on the CAM side, where progress to innovate tools has been slower.
As the costs of modern machining technology has dropped and become more accessible, more and more designers... Read More

When designers and engineers think about design associativity, they often think about history-based 3D modeling systems. CAD software that deploys a history-based approach to modeling requires engineers to anticipate and define feature constraints, relations and dependencies, which ensures that any design change will update all related downstream geometry. That’s design associativity.
Though they require a lot more work, thought and pre-planning on the part of the user,... Read More

In today’s highly competitive markets, the ability of a manufacturer to develop successful, innovative products often hinges on how well it fosters, fleshes out and evolves new ideas and concepts into new products. The problem with this conceptual design phase of development is that engineers and designers often struggle with what tools are best to use.
They need highly flexible tools that enable them to freely explore myriad of design alternatives and don’t lock... Read More

Participants in yesterday’s “The Pros and Cons of History-based and Direct Modeling Paradigms” webinar heard from three leading experts on the strengths and weaknesses of both modeling approaches as well as where each modeling approach shines throughout the product development process. We learned that both tools are useful though some are better suited for particular applications as well as for use in specific phases of the product development process.
While... Read More

Siemens has entered into an agreement to acquire TESIS PLMware, recognized in the integration of product lifecycle management (PLM) software with other enterprise applications. The acquisition will further enhance Siemens’ industry software portfolio. TESIS PLMware helps customers improve IT costs and efficiency by providing a proven solution for the integration of Siemens’ Teamcenter® software with the world’s leading ERP systems and other enterprise applications such... Read More

Encouraging young students to study engineering and science is a pursuit that will benefit all of us as we move into the future. The world we live in today is driven by technology and the need for creating scientists and engineers who will be empowered to steer that technology in beneficial directions is vital to us all.
The engineers and scientists we educate today are the ones who will tackle current challenges such as global warming and other environmental issues, spur the... Read More

by L. Stephen Wolfe, P.E.
Here’s a look at the features and capabilities of version 1.05 of Solid Edge.
CAMWorks was first published as an add-in application for numerically controlled (NC) tool programming in SolidWorks in 1997. In June 2013, Geometric Software released a version of CAMWorks integrated with Solid Edge, the value priced CAD system from Siemens PLM Software. Although seven computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software products have achieved so-called Gold Partner... Read More